Nine Months of Hell

It was mid-September 1862, and the 900 soldiers of the 130th Pennsylvania Infantry were marching through western Maryland. Pvt. Edward Spangler — all 16 years and 92 pounds of him — struggled to stay with his regiment. The heat was “intense,” Spangler later wrote, “and the suffocating dust more than ankle deep.” Hundreds of raw recruits, ill-prepared and exhausted, were collapsing by the roadside.

The situation, however, was about to get worse. On Sept. 17, the 130th joined in an assault on Confederates defending a sunken road near Antietam Creek. Private Spangler was wounded in the battle along with 145 of his fellow Pennsylvanians, while 32 others were killed.

Spangler and his comrades had enlisted barely six weeks ago. They were militiamen raised for nine months’ emergency service, part of a nationwide effort to turn the tide after a shocking series of enemy victories. They had expected relatively safe assignments; back home in York County, a newspaper had claimed that their brief service would consist of “garrison duty, and the elementary duties of a soldier’s life.” The men and boys of the 130th had reason to recall this breezy prediction as they made their punishing march north and fought Robert E. Lee’s invaders. Clearly, a short tour of duty was no safeguard against the trauma of war.

The story of the nine-month men had begun earlier that summer. Late June saw one of the most stunning reversals in American military history as the rebels drove Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac back from the outskirts of Richmond, Va.; by July, they seemed poised to attack Washington. In the North, rejoicing at imminent victory turned into despair. After a year of costly fighting, national reunion seemed more doubtful than ever before.

Library of CongressMen of the 22d New York State Militia near Harper’s Ferry, Va.

Abraham Lincoln knew that carrying on the war would require reinvigorating the Northern people and replacing the many thousands of troops lost through death, discharge or desertion. On July 2 he announced a call for 300,000 volunteers. The initial response was far from promising. With no end to the war in sight, few men were stepping forward.

Public officials and the press urged the president to take a sterner course. “Men will not volunteer for a lingering war,” a committee of prominent citizens told Lincoln. “When you order, they will obey; but at present there unquestionably is a general indisposition to volunteer upon your mere invitation.”

With invitation proving a failure, it was time to try coercion. Lincoln’s Militia Act of July 17 authorized the government to enroll all military-age male citizens for a possible draft and gave the president the power to order state militiamen into the Union Army for up to nine months. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton followed this up on Aug. 4 with a draft for 300,000 nine-month militia. In a year that was full of turning points, the Union war effort had reached yet another: the federal government now had the power to override state officials and compel citizens to serve. For the remainder of the war, Northerners would live under the threat of conscription.

A century and a half on, the notion that troops would only be needed for a nine-month term may seem foolishly optimistic. But logic and tradition undergirded the Aug. 4 call-up. A three-year enlistment was simply too long for the large numbers of potential recruits who were constrained by economic or family concerns. “I claim the right to decline,” a Pennsylvanian explained, for “confining enlistments to a term of three years excludes a worthy class.” Farm workers, for instance, would be available only for the short period after they had finished the fall harvest and before the next year’s planting began.

Brief service during times of national emergency was also an American tradition. Popular memory abounded with tales of the Minutemen and other citizen-soldiers of previous wars who had taken up arms, defended their country and returned home in short order. And in any case, despite recent setbacks, nobody in the North knew that the present conflict would last three more years.

As late summer turned into fall, communities across the Northern states made strenuous efforts to meet the call for volunteers. Boston’s leading businessmen promised “that their employés who enlist shall resume their employment when returned,” while numerous towns raised money to provide recruits with cash bounties and family assistance.. These and other measures proved effective. “Our people are responding to the call for troops with alacrity and enthusiasm,” a New York official telegraphed Stanton on Aug. 15. “The popular feeling is at high war heat. It has cost much to get this steam up. Pray do not require the Governor to ‘blow it off.’”

To keep enlistments at full steam, the War Department announced that volunteers would be accepted for nine months in lieu of draftees, and that state governments could count each three-year recruit as as the equivalent of four nine-month militiamen. These measures may have been “of dubious legality and confusing arithmetic,” as one historian has written, but they did the job. Although 87,588 men responded to the militia call, the total of enlistments that summer and fall was over half a million.

The majority of the nine-month men hailed from the Northeast, especially Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Pvt. Zenas T. Haines of Boston noted that his company included “54 former clerks, five merchants, and nine students of Tufts, Harvard, and Yale.” This company boasted of a particularly far-sighted member: Pvt. Horace Parnell Tuttle, a renowned astronomer who “hoped to be placed upon the round of the night sentinel” so that he could resume his stargazing.

The Rev. James K. Hosmer, a young pastor from Deerfield, Mass., turned down a position on a general’s staff in order to serve in the color guard of the 52nd Massachusetts. “The cause of the North,” Corporal Hosmer believed, was “the cause of civilization and liberty. To help this, I have preached, made speeches, and talked in private. Ought I not to practice what I preach?” The recruits of one New Hampshire regiment may have been less distinguished, but they were “full of patriotic fervor,” according to an officer, “and a service for so short a time as nine months did not seem such a hardship to their youthful imaginations.”

When given enough time and intensive training, nine-month soldiers often proved effective combatants. But time was not on the Union’s side in September 1862. Several barely organized regiments found themselves rushed to the front lines to counter Lee’s invasion of Maryland. General McClellan, who had advised against short-term recruitment, was forced to integrate these raw troops into the Army of the Potomac just days before meeting the enemy at Antietam. A staff officer called the nine-month men of the 27th Connecticut “excellent material, but from the colonel down wholly inexperienced.” The commander of the 128th Pennsylvania asked a three-year officer to show him how to form his men into line of battle, explaining that he hadn’t had time to buy a drill manual.

Some regiments, such as Edward Spangler’s 130th Pennsylvania, stood and fired without maneuvering or taking cover, suffering grievous losses. Others panicked and fell apart. “The men were of excellent stamp, ready and willing,” a corps commander observed, “but neither officers nor men knew anything, and there was an absence of the mutual confidence which drill begets.” Historians frequently point out that McClellan’s forces at Antietam greatly outnumbered those of Lee. It is worth noting, however, that a quarter of McClellan’s infantrymen were new recruits, putting his failure to crush the invader in a somewhat different light.

No matter where they served, the dangers and discomforts of army life seemed to weigh especially heavily on the nine-month men. Among the regiments sent to Louisiana — where six nine-month soldiers died of disease for every one killed in battle — the harsh conditions and lack of battlefield success caused widespread demoralization. As Frank H. Sterns of the 52nd Massachusetts wrote his parents: “I think nine months is as much time as I can afford my country if they don’t do things in a more business like manner.” Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks blamed his short-term regiments for his failure to take Port Hudson, La., by storm, claiming that the men “openly say they do not consider themselves bound to any perilous service.” Few seemed willing to risk their lives when their return home was just over the horizon.

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Long-service soldiers heaped scorn on their nine-month counterparts, accusing them of cowardice and mercenary motives. “Hump yourself, you Government swindler,” a picket from a three-year regiment told a straggler from the nine-month 132nd Pennsylvania, “take your bounty-full carcass out of my sight!” The militiamen were derided as “poor stuff,” “complete government robbers,” and “the Pick Nic party.” But insults from civilians and the press back in the North were especially stinging. Nine-month men were upset by attitudes like that expressed by The New York Tribune, which called them “beauties who enlisted for the bounties, and took into the service neither health, patriotism, nor honesty.”

Beset by such insults and the harsh Southern climate, many surviving militiamen found their muster out of service anticlimactic. Corporal Hosmer and the 52nd Massachusetts boarded a transport ship in late July 1863, having lost comrades from fever up to the very end. “We marched aboard,” Hosmer recalled, “a nerveless, debilitated company, too weak and sick to show joy even at going home.”

Few of the nine-month men seemed to care that their term of service was ending during another desperate time for the Union cause: the defeat at Chancellorsville and Lee’s second invasion of the North. A Union general complained that several regiments, “who had taken up arms having had no opportunity to use them,” were now being discharged at a time when their services were badly needed. In one notorious incident, the secretary of war convinced members of the 27th Maine to briefly extend their term by promising each man a Medal of Honor. As their service came to an end, the Tribune summed up public opinion by dismissing the call for nine-month troops as a “costly and disastrous experiment.”

Not surprisingly, nine-month veterans preferred to gloss over the uninspiring times when they reflected on their service in later years. They erected monuments to their regiments at Antietam Battlefield and wrote memoirs depicting themselves as the equals of the three-year men in courage and devotion. As one old soldier observed, “hostile bullets made little distinction between three months’, nine months’ or three years’ men, and … the man who left his arm or leg on the field was seldom asked whether his lost member was enlisted for the war or only for a limited period.” These facts are beyond dispute. Edward Spangler and the 130th Pennsylvania learned them only too well in September 1862, as they advanced toward a sunken road near Antietam Creek.

Sources: John Y. Beall, “Memoir of John Yates Beall”; George Grenville Benedict, “Army Life in Virginia”; William Blair, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham — Eventually: The Problem of Northern Nationalism in the Pennsylvania Recruiting Drives of 1862,” in “The War Was You and Me,” ed. Joan E. Cashin; Charles P. Bosson, “History of the Forty-Second Regiment Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862, 1863, 1864”; Samuel P. Chase, “Diary and Correspondence of Samuel P. Chase”; Howard Coffin, “Nine Months to Gettysburg”; Regis De Trobriand, “Four Years of Campaigns in the Army of the Potomac”; James W. Geary, “We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War”; Zenas T. Haines, “‘In the Country of the Enemy,’” ed. William C. Harris; D. Scott Hartwig, “Who Would Not Be a Soldier: The Volunteers of ’62 in the Maryland Campaign,” in “The Antietam Campaign,” ed. Gary W. Gallagher; Frederick L. Hitchcock, “War From the Inside”; James G. Hollandsworth Jr., “Nine-Months Men at Port Hudson: Did They Make a Difference?” in Louisiana History 46 (2005); James K. Hosmer, “The Color Guard”; Charles N. Kent, “History of the Seventeenth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry”; William Landon, “Fourteenth Indiana Regiment, Peninsular Campaign to Chancellorsville: Letters to the Vincennes Western Sun,” in the Indiana Magazine of History 33 (1937); Jeffrey D. Marshall, ed., “A War of the People: Vermont Civil War Letters”; Glenn L. McMullen, “A Massachusetts Soldier at the Siege of Port Hudson, 1863,” in Louisiana History 26 (1985); The New York Tribune, 1862-63; James M. McPherson, “Battle Cry of Freedom”; Charles H. Parkhurst, “Incidents of Service with the Eleventh Regiment Rhode Island Volunteers”; John J. Pullen, “A Shower of Stars: The Medal of Honor and the 27th Maine”; Edward H. Rogers, “Reminiscences of Military Service in the Forty-Third Regiment, Massachusetts Infantry, During the Great Civil War, 1862-63”; Nina Silber and Mary Beth Sievens, eds., “Yankee Correspondence”; Mark A. Snell, “‘If They Would Know What I Know It Would Be Pretty Hard To Raise One Company in York’: Recruiting, the Draft, and Society’s Response in York County, Pennsylvania, 1861-1865,” in “Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front,” ed. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller; Edward W. Spangler, “My Little War Experience”; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Ser. 3, Vol. 2.

Will Hickox is a graduate student in American history at the University of Kansas.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.